The prime minister, with one late afternoon statement in his courtyard, has created a yardstick that has not previously existed in Australia’s “live and let live”, “she’ll be right mate” politics.

What Turnbull said about Joyce and the code of conduct changes – full transcript

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Turnbull has made it OK to make visceral judgments about our elected representatives, at least the occupants of the executive, on moral or “character” grounds.

When you stand up as a public figure, the prime minister no less, and excoriate your colleague for failing the character test of authority and public leadership – which is precisely what Turnbull did to Barnaby Joyce on Thursday afternoon – then moral judgments of political figures become sanctioned activity.

We did have an implicit debate in this country about the morality or character of a political figure when Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, occupied the Lodge – one led by Tony Abbott, who was prone to sharing passive aggressive asides about Gillard’s intrinsic unfitness, including but not limited to inviting her semi-regularly to make “an honest woman” of herself.

But now, courtesy of Turnbull’s abrupt altering of the rules of engagement for Australian public life, we are going to have an explicit one.

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Malcolm Turnbull announces ban on ministers having sex with their staffers – video

Unless ministers abide by the terms that the prime minister has just laid out, we are going to have a caterwauling free-for-all. Open season on political office affairs, on transgressions, on uncouplings – conscious or otherwise. Telephoto lenses trained on private moments and tabloid reckonings. Because character is now a legitimate question.

Why? Because the prime minister said so. The prime minister has sanctioned federal parliament’s sex round.

Turnbull is to be applauded for taking on gender, and calling out the structural power imbalances in testosterone-fuelled bro-zones like professional politics, and for having the desire to drag Canberra’s crass, smug and self-satisfied “one rule for us club” into some kind of equivalence with workplace standards that exist elsewhere, correctly, in the age of #MeToo.

It’s a consequential redrawing of the boundaries, sitting in judgment of other people’s relationships, which sometimes look a whole lot different to the people inside them than they do to people sitting outside; and henceforth, Turnbull won’t be the only person making the judgments.

The bottom line is you can start this conversation, but you can’t control where it goes.

Also somewhat out of control is the relationship between the two men who run the country.

I can’t see how the relationship between Joyce and Turnbull survives the acid reflections the prime minister made on Thursday afternoon.

Australia bans ministers from having sex with staff after Barnaby Joyce scandal

Turnbull has as good as said he wants Joyce to resign, not on an abstract public interest technicality, but on a question of fitness.

This isn’t just meddling in the affairs of the National party, it is publicly dictating terms in a manner I haven’t seen before in 20 years in this building.

Turnbull has thrown petrol on a bonfire. It will be fascinating to see how Joyce and his colleagues respond.

Q&A

Why can't Malcolm Turnbull sack Barnaby Joyce?

Barnaby Joyce is not a member of Malcolm Turnbull's Liberal party, he is the leader of the National party, which governs in coalition with the Liberals. In the same way that the prime minister could not sack the leader of the Labor party, he has no power to force the Nationals to change their leader.

There is a coalition agreement between the leaders about the terms of their political partnership. The agreement is secret, but one of its cornerstones is that the leader of the National party will be deputy prime minister when the Coalition is in government and therefore acting prime minister in the absence of the PM.

Turnbull could remove Joyce from the position of deputy prime minister by ending the Coalition between Liberals and Nationals. However, because the two parties combined only have a one-seat majority over Labor in the House of Representatives, that would be risky.